Most movie fans know that Marvel’s X-Men characters reside at 20th Century Fox and The Avengers reside at Marvel Studios, owned by Disney. It’s the type of distinction that might seem insignificant to some, but is in fact very important, as movie studios rarely share their prized properties. So while Avengers vs. X-Men has been a huge success in the Marvel Comics world, with new Avengers and X-Men movies both in the works independent of one another, the odds of a crossover are slim to none.

But slim is better than none and the wheels are turning. Mark Millar, a huge comic fan, has just been brought on board at Fox to extract some of the magic Marvel has tapped into with their Cinematic Universe and now Lauren Shuler Donner, one of the X-Men producers who has been on board since the film franchise launched, has said she’d “love” to blend the two universes. Read her quote and more after the jump.

Note: This quote was in today’s Superhero Bits, but is now being expanded upon.

Q: Now that The Avengers has done so well, it seems like the other studios with Marvel properties can see the advantage of making a deal. Can you see a world where this generation of X-Men could be in an Avengers movie?

Lauren Shuler Donner: I would love it. I would love it. I personally have close ties to Marvel because of Kevin Feige, because Kevin worked for me. But to take our characters and mingle them in the way that they were written, yeah, absolutely.

As someone who’s been attached to the X-Men since the late Nineties, Shuler Donner is obviously a fan and what fan wouldn’t want to see The Avengers and X-Men together on the big screen? However, if it was to happen, it literally couldn’t until the latter part of this decade at the earliest. X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Avengers 2 are scheduled for release in 2014 and 2015 respectively and neither will have team members owned by the other studios. But you can bet on Millar (and Feige’s) long to-do list is “Reunite all the Marvel characters.” (Including Spider-Man, housed at Sony.) So even if a deal was struck tomorrow (it won’t be, that’s just hypothetical), the movie would likely have to happen after those two films were completed.

The issue, of course, isn’t a creative one. There are decades upon decades of stories to draw from including all these characters. It’s a financial thing, as in, who would pony up the cash? Who would distribute? How would the grosses be split across the world? Studios have been known to share some of these responsibilities – Paramount even has a slice of the earlier Marvel movies because of a deal before Disney was involved – so anything is possible. But it’s complicated and competitive.